March.

A month of grief

There is something about March, It’s a hard month for me.

It starts out with International Women’s Day on the 8th, which I’ve long believed to be a corporate rort. I worked in corporate for 17 years, and the cupcakes and stickers are a performance of nausea-inducing levels. If you care about women, pay them and promote them in equal parts to men.

I don’t want to see your glamour pics on LinkedIn titled ‘Proud to celebrate women in power’.

I want to see your bank balance being equal to a white mans. Don’t get me started, please. I don’t need empowerment, I need pay.

Then the 12^th of March rolls around.

CW this essay contains references to mental health issues and guns. Please read gently.

The 12^th of March 1992 is a date seared into my brain. It’s the date my mother decided, for the first time I’m aware of, that we might leave both the McConnell family and the Truth 2x2s. We lasted 3 weeks.

It came after an enormous argument, when us kids got locked in a spare room, while she got absolutely smashed drunk on the bottle of port which we kept for Sunday Morning Meetings, for the emblems. She got drunk on the emblems….if this whole story wasn’t so traumatic, it would be hilarious.

She passed out, vomited everywhere in this locked bedroom. Then the next morning she packed us up and decided, for the first time I’m aware of, to leave the whole McConnell circus.

She had a second cousin who lived one town over from us out west. It was an odd situation, as her family came from the south, but this cousin had packed up, much like my mother had, and left the family to build his own life out west.

We knew his name, we knew all about him. But we didn’t speak to him.

Welcome to 2x2 dysfunction.

He’d divorced his first 2x2 wife and remarried. He ran a successful business, drove a nice car, lived in a flash house. Everyone in the district knew them. We avoided interactions with them, dutifully driving off or changing isles in the supermarket when we encountered them.

Despite us never speaking to this man and his worldly wife, when we turned up on their doorstep on the 13^th March 1992, he and his wife welcomed us with open arms. No questions, no hostility.

I’m not sure I’d be so gracious in their situation.

Here is the story of Cousin Doug and the 3 glorious weeks we lived with him, in March 1992.

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Cousin Doug

You’re not meant to drink alcohol in The Truth, it’s The Work of the Devil.

No one in this Truth community openly drinks alcohol, except for a sip of port from a fancy cup on Sundays for our version of ‘communion’ (called taking ‘The Emblems’).

My parents keep a carafe of McWilliams Tawny Port in our fancy china cabinet for the Sunday Meeting Emblems. Drinking that port outside of The Emblems is sacrilegious. After each Sunday Meeting, dad in his role as Elder, takes the left-over port in the special cup outside. He has a special place in the garden to bury it. The blood of Christ. Buried in our garden. I wonder what Christ would feel about being buried next to our dead pet budgies every week, alongside the compost?

Dad comes home mostly for Meetings. He lives on the family farms. Mum works 75km the other direction, as a teacher in a predominantly Indigenous school. It’s a marriage held together mostly for the purposes of 2x2 ritual and community. They can’t divorce because it’s against the rules. They live separate lives. Dad lives with Caroline, with his parents on the farm or on the road with mobs of sheep. I’m stuck in the middle, caring for the little ones and being expected to be far wiser and older than my 12 years of age.

Mum starts drinking the port.

She arrives home from work, furtively pours herself a coffee mug of port, alone in the kitchen while us kids do our chores. She thinks I don’t know what’s in that mug.

As the evening wears on, she starts the well-worn ritual of calling around to try and find dad. None of us ever know where he’ll be, except on Wednesday nights or Sunday Mornings – when he turns up for Meetings.

There is a ritual – mum calls the general store near the farm, asks when they last saw him fill up the car with petrol, when he last collected the farm mail. Then she calls Caroline. She always says she’s not seen him.

Then she gets on the two-way radio to contact the farm shed/caravan my grandparents live in. It’s always a last resort – they’re always hostile that she’s trying to find him. Perhaps annoyed their son can’t manage his own marriage and family.

Sometimes, she finds him at the farm. Sometimes there is yelling about how he never comes home to care for his kids, screaming matches about money and the lack of it.

March 12 1992, there is a particularly aggressive call.

Mums worked her way through more glasses of port than usual. My bedroom was closest the kitchen, I can hear the telephone conversations, the sound of the china cabinet door opening, the pouring of more mugs of port.

Mum becomes hysterical. She’s sobbing and screaming at the kitchen table.

I came out of my room to try to calm her. I’m worried the little kids will wake up and be scared.

As she sits screaming and ranting at the kitchen table, she decides dad is dangerous.

I’m a mere kid; I’ve just turned 12. I’m used to defusing, deflecting. Worrying. Being responsible.

She says I need to get the little kids out of bed, lock them in the spare room. Dads dangerous and we need to be locked away from him.

The spare room is the only room in our house that has a lock. She’s organised for our spare room to have one, because the Workers use it once a year. Workers need doors which lock, apparently.

The spare room also has the family guns in the wardrobe.

I carry the sleepy, groggy kids into the spare room, squish them into the bunk beds side-by-side.

Mums ranting. She’s decided that dad will have left the farm by now, be on his way into town, that he’s dangerous and he’s going to hurt us.

I keep asking ‘Why? Why will he hurt us?’

Dad is a problematic man, at 12 I know that. I know he grows marijuana, has a second family, lives this double life that no one in our community seems bothered by or willing to stand up to. But despite all the issues I can very clearly see, that he doesn’t support us financially, doesn’t stick around to care for us – I don’t believe him to be a violent person. I have never seen him use physical violence. If anyone in that house uses physical violence, its my mother.

(I later realise he is violent, he uses a leather strap on us, but in the context of 1980’s / 1990’s Australia – it doesn’t register with me as violence).

I am confused.

Mums still drinking from that coffee mug.

‘Listen out for the car. He’ll be here soon. We’ve all got to listen out and be ready.’

What are we meant to be prepared for?

The little ones keep asking, ‘What’s he going to do to us?’

‘Break the windows probably,’ she replies. ‘He’s dangerous’

She had entered a state of delusional paranoia, but that wasn’t a concept I knew. I had no idea what was happening. I now believe she was having a serious mental health episode.

A few hours pass. We all sit terrified listening for the sound of the car, for the sound of breaking glass. There are guns in the cupboard next to us. There’s mum’s drunk, raving state. Everyone is scared. I’ve started singing hymns to the little ones, to soothe them.

Around midnight, dad does turn up.

The littlies have finally fallen asleep, huddled together next to me on the lower bunk bed. I’m wide awake, hyper alert, cuddling the little ones. Dad knocks on the spare room door and tries to negotiate with mum, tries to get her to open the door and let us kids out to go with him to the farm. She refuses.

Eventually she says that she’ll come out to speak with him on the condition that the kids are staying in the room. She has me lock the door after her. I’m terrified. Locked in a room with the guns and kids, while the adults fight.

The yelling and screaming goes on for hours in my 12-year-old mind. I lie there, daydreaming. Now I’d call it ‘dissociated’. I’m reading bible verses, repeating hymns in my head.

I hear dad’s car roar off down the street, back off to the farm. Mum has me unlock the door, she comes in and vomits into a waste-paper bin. A bin she has specially bought for Workers, which sits under the writing desk she restored for them to write their Worker letters. Good use of the bin, on point.

She then promptly passes out. I’m left there, the only one awake, hyper alert, clutching the little ones on the bunk bed, still terrified of dad breaking the windows.

I’ll lie in bed each night for the next 30 years, hyperalert to noises. To this day I try to sleep with a light on wherever possible, and doors slightly ajar. I never want to be locked in a dark room ever again.

The sound of a Toyota Hilux, specifically the sound of the engines in the models from 1988 to 1995, will forever give me flashbacks when I hear them in traffic.

13^th March 1992

Eventually the sun comes up. I unlock the spare bedroom door and usher the kids back to their own beds. I make myself breakfast, put wood on the kitchen stove.

Mum wakes up, hung over. She has me pack a few suitcases of clothes; says we’re leaving.

‘Where are we going?’ I ask. Wondering if she is taking us back to dad at the farm.

‘Doug and Marissa’s’ she replies, firmly.

Shes’ really thought it through, even if shes obviously hung over.

“Doug? As in COUSIN DOUG”? I ask, astounded.

This is same Doug we last week drove around the block to avoid at the farm supply store, because he divorced his first Truth 2x2 wife and married Marissa, a heathen worldly woman?!

An hour later we turn up at their beautifully styled home, with plush white carpet, a pool, lovely, lush green lawns. Us in our clapped-out car, filled with a few changes of clothes, a bunch of kids, a dog and cat.

Doug, Marissa and their 4 kids don’t blink an eye. They clear out bedrooms, let us move in.

For 3 weeks, we live with them. Its like a fairytale. Marissa is a stay-at-home parent, she cooks, cleans, washes our clothes. She asks us what food we like, lets us watch TV, swim in their pool.

It’s a wonderful time. None of us kids are used to being coddled like this, cared for, nurtured. Marissa takes us to the park on Sundays, followed by take away at the local pizza place. This isn’t a world we’ve ever been near. Its calm. Nurturing.

Its there, at Doug and Marissa’s that I fall in love with a girl.

Marissa has a daughter, Olivia, from a relationship before Doug. Olivia is five years older than me, inhabits a completely different world to me. I’ve never encountered her until we move into their house.

Olivia is tall and strong, wiry and sporty. She has muscles on her calves that I can’t stop admiring. You can see them clearly because she wears short skirts, not the stupid long ones I have to wear. Olivia has sharp biceps much like my own. I’m not used to seeing strong girls like me. I love watching those biceps as she’s carrying food to the dinner table or stacking dishes from the dishwasher. I was in love. She was beautiful, strong and powerful. She had gorgeous wavy hair that sat at her shoulders, in a fashionable way I could only daydream of.

Olivia barely acknowledges that I exist. She’s a fully-fledged Worldly teenager with sports training to attend and friends to hang out with. She has no time for sitting around the house entertaining a love-struck pre-teen.

She generously gifts me a few of her old clothes to wear, as I’ve forgotten to pack my own, too busy packing for the littlies. I wear the skirt and a sweater she gives me, for about two years afterwards. I’m loath to take them off, not wanting to forget the feeling that comes from being close to Olivia.

Three weeks later, my mother decides it’s too hard to live away from the McConnell clan, away from our home and the Truth 2x2s. She packs us up, takes us back home.

As quickly as it began, our foray into the world outside is over.

We go back to the Canary Yellow House.

Postscript

I now have another date in March to navigate. Bruer-gate. 23^rd March.

The date when 2x2s and ex 2x2s decided that abuse in the 2x2s was in fact, real.

The date that survivors finally started to be believed.

Its monumental, that change which has occurred post 23 March 2023. It wasn’t default to believe survivors before 23 March 2023.

I spent decades not being believed. That all changed in one day.

The date comes with complex feelings for me. It comes with relief and gratitude. I’m glad we are believed.

But why did it take so long to believe us? What did I do wrong that I wasn’t believed? Will the people who publicly did not believe me, ever apologise?

Does the ex-2x2 community realise that the denial of survivor’s experiences prior to March 2023, has left a deep grief and hurt? Is there appetite to acknowledge that, grieve that with us?

March is complex. I’ll be glad when its over for another year.

*It breaks my heart now, all these decades later to consider what that must have been like for Doug and Marissa. We went home after those three glorious weeks with them and never spoke again. How heartbreaking for them, to have us acknowledge them for three weeks, and then promptly withdraw (in common 2x2 style) to never speak again?

I have been thinking of Olivia again recently, after being asked on a podcast about my own queer realisation. There is no grand realisation. It just was. I liked girls like Olivia, I liked boys. I always knew. It always was that way, with no doubt or issue with it in my mind. The trouble was there was no space to discuss that in my community.